Historically, Hibernate relied on standard class-loading paradigms that targeted JSE and JEE deployment environments. However, with the growth of OSGi and other modular systems like JBoss AS 7, those same approaches no longer always work. So Hibernate needed a new approach that would allow it operate in all possible deployment environments.

How?

In Hibernate 4 we leverage the ServiceRegistry to define a pluggable service for providing interaction with the class-loading of the semantics of the environment in which Hibernate will be run. Specifically, the idea is to allow external entities (the user, the environment developers, etc) to define and plug in a custom scheme for class path interactions. For example, an OSGi container could choose to provide Hibernate (either directly or as its JPA provider) and install a custom service for class loader interactions to override the default one.

JBoss AS 7 integrates with Hibernate 4.0.0.Beta1, to provide both the EE container managed JPA features and application managed access as well. The AS7 JPA subsystem integrates with Hibernate via the JPA specification SPI interfaces. In earlier releases of JBoss AS, JPA integration code was part of the EJB3 container (reflecting the evolution from EJB entity beans). Moving the JPA integration code into its own subsystem helps simplify the code and makes it easier to make changes.

Improving support for applications that use a different version of Hibernate than is packaged with JBoss AS 7. The plan is to let users deploy the Hibernate jars as well as a hibernate-jbossas7 integration jar. The integration jar will be tailored to the specific couple of Hibernate / JBoss AS version (or families of).

To be clear, Hibernate native applications can already include their own version of Hibernate in JBoss AS 7 simply by including the jar in their deployment. But we want JPA applications to benefit from this enhancement as well. Because it involves specification classes, this requires a bit more work.

We will also include additional tuning options to disable some of the JPA integration (ie prevent the container from starting the persistence unit).

What's new in AS7 in relation to Bean Validation? The short answer - nothing. It was already awesome ;) The initial version - AS 7.0 - ships with Hibernate Validator 4.1.0.Final. This is the same Validator version as in AS 6 so no change there.

The long answer is that Hibernate Validator 4.2.0.Final merely missed the AS 7.0 release train and an upgrade is planned at the latest in AS 7.1. What will the update mean for AS users? Besides the usual bug fixes and performance improvements, the biggest new feature is the implementation of appendix C of the Bean Validation specification: method level validation.

With this API a design by contract approach is possible which can already be seen in action in the Seam Validation module. Another new feature is the ability to combine the composing constraints with AND and OR operators. There is also a fail fast mode in which validation stops on the first validation error and a new message interpolator which is able to interpolate the validated value.

As you can see AS 7.0 is just the beginning. More is to come in the coming releases...

We are working on Hibernate Search 4 which will be compatible with Hibernate Core 4. As a matter of fact, we have already published a compatible version via a Maven SNAPSHOT but expect a first alpha release soon.

Hibernate Search 4 is our chance to fix mistakes from the past. To be honest, the codebase and concepts have aged quite well despite the massive feature shifts we have done in Hibernate Search. Anyways, we are doing some changes including splitting API/SPI/implementations to help people discover when they use a class that is subject to change.

We are also working on a new per index manager to better use some of the new features and design changes of Lucene. This will give you more flexibility on how to index data on a per entity level (sync/async etc).